The Battle for Miskitia Part Two: Nicaragua's new autonomy struggle
centers on biodiversity

By Bill Weinberg, Toward Freedom,August 1998

In the 1980s, the Indians of the rainforest and Caribbean coastal
plains in Nicaragua - a region collectively known as Miskitia - took
up arms against the central government of Managua to secure
constitutional guarantees of their autonomy. Today, control of their
lands is threatened again.

Since Miskitia was granted autonomy in 1987, it's been divided into
the North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN), with its seat at Puerto
Cabezas, and the South Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAS). The Indians
are mostly in the RAAN. During the last struggle, the leftist
Sandinista government attempted to nationalize Indian lands;
now President Arnoldo Aleman of the Liberal Constitutionalist Party
(PLC) wants to privatize them. Intensely politicized by their
past, the Indians are again defending their territorial rights.

On March 1, in a militarized atmosphere, the RAAN and RAAS held
regional elections. The army and National Police were out in full
force and rumors spread of armed groups attempting to disrupt the
vote. In one community, five ballot boxes were burned.

Following a presidential tour of the region in a caravan of over 100
spanking-new four-wheel-drive vehicles, Aleman?s PLC won a majority on
both councils. But the 60 percent abstention evidenced how little
confidence remains in the official autonomous governments. With
their budgets controlled by Managua, the RAAN and RAAS are only
convened at the president's call, critics say. Increasingly, the
Miskito, who inhabit the coastal plains and villages along the Rio
Coco, and the Mayangna, people of the inland forest, are returning to
their traditional forms of local self-government.

The autonomy provisions won in the 1980s look pretty good on paper,
recognizing the right of indigenous peoples to maintain and develop
their identity and culture, have their own forms of social
organization and administer to their own local affairs, maintain their
communal forms of land ownership, and to use and enjoy those
lands. But enabling legislation to establish a regional
taxation system was never passed, so the autonomous governments have
no power to raise their own money. Before the March vote, both the
RAAN and RAAS complained that their funding had been cut off.

Immediately after a February Forum on Forest Concession, which
demanded that the central government stop granting concessions on
communal lands, the Council of Elders (Consejo de Ancianos),
Miskitia's oldest governing body, convened the Ninth General
Assembly of Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Communities in Puerto
Cabezas/Bilwi. A new autonomous government structure was unveiled,
including election of an Indigenous Territories Demarcation
Commission, a Natural Resources Commission, and a Legal Commission
to define a new legal framework on which to base our
self-determination as a nation.

The ruling party increasingly views the consejo as a threat to
Nicaraguan sovereignty. Calling them separatists, Jorge
Salaverry, Aleman's special advisor on Atlantic Coast issues, told the
Managua daily La Tribuna, I note with sadness that while Europe is
abandoning frontiers between completely different countries, in
Nicaragua we are raising barriers.

At a March press conference in Managua, three ancianos and Oscar
Hodgson, legal advisor to the consejo, denied wanting to create an
independent republic in Miskitia. We stand for self-determination,
not separatism, said Hodgson. We only will press for
independence if Nicaragua will not recognize our territorial
rights. We have arms, we are ex-combatants, and we are ready to
fight.

The land question could force the issue. The central government
considers those Miskitia lands not titled to be national
lands. There are no national lands, replies Oscar
Hodgson. Nicaragua has no right to grant concessions for
exploitation of natural resources in our territory.

Titling of indigenous lands has been moving forward slowly since
Miskitia was formally incorporated into Nicaragua in 1894, but
accelerated during the Sandinista years. And in March 1997, Aleman
introduced a new Ley de Comunidades to the National Assembly, which
would do away with the notion of communal lands, instead parcelling
out small plots to each Indian family. Although the National Assembly
has yet to act on the bill, the process is already underway in the Rio
Prinzapolka area, provoking much protest. This clearly violates
constitutional autonomy, says Hodgson.

The hidden agenda behind this scheme, he asserts, is made clear in a
draft document entitled Preparing for the Next Millennium. It
was produced by the Aleman administration for the Geneva-based
Nicaragua Consulting Group, made up of European governments aiding
Nicaraguan development. The document, dated April 1998, is marked
only for discussion. But the section on land policy reads:
[T]he Government is ... removing restrictions that still exist on
the sale of land ... . Although indigenous communities were given
communal titles to their lands, the owners are free to privatize or
sell their properties.

In contrast, Article 36 of the Autonomy Statute reads: Communal
lands are inalienable and imprescriptable; they cannot be transferred,
sold, seized or assessed.

The Embattled Bosawas

A generation ago, the Miskito Rainforest stretched in an unbroken
canopy from the Rio Coco on the Honduran border to the Rio San Juan on
the Costa Rican border. Since then, campesino colonization has gutted
the middle zone.

The last large stretches of closed-canopy rainforest survive in the
remote areas to the north and south, now officially protected as the
Bosawas Biosphere Reserve along the Rio Coco and the Indio-Maiz
Biological Reserve in the Rio San Juan basin. Small patches of
original closed-canopy forest or secondary growth continue to extend
between the two, but are rapidly shrinking.

The global significance of this besieged biodiversity has attracted
the attention of the UN and World Bank. In February 1998, Bosawas
received UN certification as a biosphere reserve, allowing the
Nicaraguan government access to special global funds for conservation
and sustainable development. Almost all the people within this
sparsely inhabited territory are Mayangna, and some Mayangna
communities have titled communal lands within the borders of the
reserve. But the reserve was created without consulting either with
these communities or the regional authorities.

The World Bank's new Global Environment Facility (GEF) lays out the
strategy for protection of Bosawas in a June 1997 Project Document
entitled Nicaragua: Atlantic Biological Corridor. The corridor,
proposed to link Bosawas and Rio San Juan, is seen as the first
segment of the planned Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, an
isthmus-long chain of protected areas. A $7.1 million GEF grant, with
an associated $12.8 million from European aid agencies, is slated for
Nicaragua under the project.

In August 1996, then-President Chamorro created the 22-member
Demarcation Commission as a condition of GEF funding. It now includes
five Indian representatives. But critics say it's so inactive as to
exist in name only. Mollins Erants, who lives in the Bosawas Mayangna
community of Betlehem on the Rio Pis Pis, remarks, We protect the
forest. We don't destroy the forest. We clear some land for our
cattle, but not thousands and thousands of hectares like those who
come here from the Pacific. The government says, 'We will give you a
title,' but we are still waiting.

Development Disputes

Nicaragua's most prominent environmentalist is Jaime Incer. Chief of
the Natural Resources and Environmental Ministry (MARENA) when the
agency was created in 1994, he's the real intellectual patriarch of
Bosawas. Incer portrays himself as the last bulwark against massive
resource exploitation in the region.

I was fighting the Economy Ministry, he says. As soon as I
was moved out as MARENA minister, the way was cleared for big
concessions in the forest. Incer is now an advisor to the National
Council for Sustainable Development, created under GEF tutelage. He
continues to advocate for Bosawas and the Atlantic Corridor from this
reduced position. Although the situation improved somewhat in the
Sandinista years, he says, it is now at its worst, with nearly 100,000
hectares of rainforest being lost annually to campesino colonization.

In some ways, Incer sees the region's autonomous status as an obstacle
to preservation. There is no definition of 'autonomy' or 'comunal
lands.' It is a chaotic situation, which encourages competition
between the central government and regional government as to who will
get the benefits from logging concessions.

Though Incer is skeptical of indigenous autonomy, he also sees the
traditional model of central government control as outmoded. I
don't believe in regulation, he says. Rather, government's role is
to help promote a climate in which there is more value in
maintaining forests than in cutting them. He points to new
preservation strategies such as ecotourism development. The GEF
Bosawas protection strategy includes that and biologically friendly
investment. But access of such outside investors may be a
precondition of local communities receiving aid. Financing for
community development projects will be available as a quid pro quo
in exchange for the communitys formal agreement to manage its lands
in a manner consistent with the plans.

A prime example is the 62,000-hectare logging concession granted to
Sol del Caribe, SA, (SOLCARSA) in Miskitia. George Brooks, Director
General of the State Forest Administration (ADFOREST), portrays that
concession as responsible development. Sixty percent of everything
that's been published about SOLCARSA is false. They never even touched
a single tree in their concession area. He also dismisses the Awas
Tingni (a Mayangna village) claim to the concession area, asserting
that the Indians there were stirred up by gringo outsiders. The
90,000 hectares claimed by Awas Tingni and the GIS team from Iowa is a
lie. Those are national, state-owned lands.

But did the SOLCARSA concession area encroach on the Bosawas buffer
zone, as opponents have argued' That is another lie, claims
Brooks.

Part of the confusion lies in the conflicting definitions of the
buffer zone. Bosawas maps with the MARENA logo show the buffer
zone conforming to the outer boundaries of the municipalities. This
looks like a huge protected area, but actually puts a great deal of
campesino settlement, gold mining, and logging activity within the
buffer zone.

Jorge Luis Prendiz, geological engineer with MEDE-MINAS, the Economy
Ministry's mining agency, denies that there are mining operations in
the Bosawas buffer zone. His office map shows the mining town of
Bonanza just beyond the border.

Forcing the Issue

Gerardo Gutierrez is a veteran guerilla fighter who studied
agro-ecology in Brazil and now heads a Puerto Cabezas-based
environmental group, the Center for Conservation & Sustainable
Development (CONADES). With seed money from Burlington, Vermont, which
has a Sister City program with Puerto Cabezas, CONADES is promoting
organic cacao production in 33 RAAN communities. Born within the
borders of what is now the Boswas reserve, Gutierrez was among the
first to raise alarm over SOLCARSA.

Our lands rights within the Bosawas reserve are still unclear,
says Gutierrez. Aleman wants to give us 50 manzanas per family, and
the rest of the land can be given to any concession. This is what they
are trying to impose on us. But we indigenas are not accustomed to
live that way. We hold the land in common for all our families to work
and fish and hunt together.

He says that if the constitutional autonomy system doesn't work,
indigenous communities will once again organize independently of the
government. I don't care about any of the political parties. I care
about rights for indigenous peoples and protection of their lands. The
central government does nothing for us.

The Indian resistance against the Sandinistas really began in what is
now the Bosawas reserve. In 1980, following Sandinista
nationalization of the forest resources, hundreds of Mayangna
in the Bosawas region, armed with machetes and axes, blockaded roads
and confronted government timber cutters. This was the first physical
confrontation between indigenous peoples and the Sandinista
government.

The new controversy has prompted Managua into taking some measures to
preserve the image of rainforest preservation. In May 1997, Aleman
issued an executive decree declaring a five-year moratorium on export
of the most precious rainforest woods, mahogany and cedar.

Garcia Cantarero, Aleman's coordinator for the biological corridor,
admits that it was the Mayangna themselves who forced the government
to confront this issue. Nobody wants to face the real reason SOLCARSA
never touched the concession, he says. They were afraid to. The
Indians blocked them. They were clearly ready to stand in front of the
logging trucks with their machetes.

Bill Weinberg visited Nicaragua early in 1998, and worked with the
Native Forest Network to develop this story.